Junkyard Find: 1978 Mercedes-Benz 300CD
Mercedes-Benz W123 coupes aren’t so easy to find these days, though I was able to spot this Crusher-bound ’78 280CE last year. Last week, in a different Denver-area yard, I ran across today’s find: an oil-burning ’78 300CD.
With the 3-liter OM617 five-cylinder diesel engine, a strong contender for the Most Reliable Car Engine of All Time Award, these things usually get scrapped only when they get too ugly to be worth fixing. 236,529 miles isn’t much for one of these cars.
The W123 coupes were sort of frivolous purchases at the time— if you wanted just two doors in your German luxury car, you were expected to get a BMW 6 Series and maybe a gold razor-blade medallion to get tangled in your exposed chest hair.
This one isn’t rusty and the body is pretty straight, but fixing the trashed interior wasn’t worth the cost to its final owner.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
Hi all! I registered so I could talk about the 300CD. I owned a couple built about a month after the one pictured: same blue colors. Those who talk about the slow start are absolutely right, but once you got the beast up to 85 miles per hour you could drive 700 miles before stopping for fuel. I picked up my aquablau '78 300CD in late 1977 and drove more than 725,000 miles without a major repair - yep, the transmission was just fine in 2006. I bought more batteries, starters and alternators than you can shake a stick at, and replaced an annoying number of pneumatic controllers for the A/C and cruise. But, if you cared for these engineer-designed cars, kept the fluids and filters changed regularly and scrupulously, they would outlast you. Mine was stolen out of our garage in Florida. We didn't know it was gone for 4 months - and by then it was too late to track down: she was in pieces. Few days go by that I don't think about replacing her, but there's no way another would live up to my expectations.
We had a 85 300SD 4 door back in the early 90kand it was a really smooth car. I remember helping my dad change the diesel filters on it.